Evidence of meeting #12 for Official Languages in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was question.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:20 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Corbeil and Mr. Houle.
For immigrants to New Brunswick, the figure is 11.7. Is that a number or a percentage? Are we talking about 11.7% per year?
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
That's the 2006 Census. We don't check every year, but, in 2006, we calculated the percentage of immigrants for whom French was the first official language spoken, and we also determined that it was 12% of them. In overall terms, we're talking about some 3,000 persons. If we add the 600 persons who use both languages, that totals 3,600 immigrants. In short, in New Brunswick, French is the first official language spoken for approximately 3,600 immigrants.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
You say that 70% of francophone immigrants living outside Quebec settle in Ontario.
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
Exactly, and that's mainly in Ottawa and Toronto.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Two-thirds of francophone immigrants live in one of three cities: Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Have you previously determined why they settle in those cities?
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
The fact that Toronto was one of those cities is not very surprising, given that it already takes in most immigrants in general. Immigrants who speak English and French, like all other immigrants, try to settle in Toronto. As for Ottawa, the fact that it is the federal capital and close to Quebec means that French-speaking immigrants very much tend to settle there.
I know that efforts are being made by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to increase the number of French-speaking immigrants to New Brunswick. Of course, the arrival of immigrants is a relatively recent phenomenon in New Brunswick. It's evolving. Most immigrants obviously settle in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa because those three cities already take in most immigrants, regardless of language.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Do you check what goes on at the embassies? Do you know what kind of promotion is done for regions other than Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal?
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
The Citizenship and Immigration Canada people would be in a better position than I am to answer that question.
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
No, we don't have any information on that.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
That's fine.
It's true that New Brunswick is making an effort right now. The province is less well positioned than Quebec, for example, which I congratulate. It should not be forgotten that Quebec already has immigration offices in other francophone countries, which gives it the opportunity to attract people to Quebec. Quebec will not promote New Brunswick, and I don't blame it. It's up to Citizenship and Immigration Canada to do that.
However, it is surprising to see that 70% of people go elsewhere. Do they explain why? Is it because they have more of a chance to get a job in Toronto?
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
With regard to Toronto, I must point out that, outside Canada, when people think of a city in Canada, they don't necessarily think of Moncton. That's unfortunate, because I like Moncton a lot.
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
We're going to focus—
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Yvon Godin NDP Acadie—Bathurst, NB
I agree with you. When Industry Canada advertises to attract immigrants to Canada and someone says not to go to Val-Comeau, New Brunswick and that it would be much better in Toronto if you have a business, that doesn't really encourage people to come to New Brunswick.
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
You have to bear in mind that New Brunswick has approximately 235,000 francophones—
9:25 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
—outside Quebec. Ontario has nearly 500,000. Given the fact that there are nevertheless a lot of francophones in New Brunswick and that they are essentially concentrated in the north, that sometimes becomes a less crucial issue. In all cases, it's less the case than in Ontario, for example, where the proportion of francophones is less than 5%.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Mauril Bélanger
Thank you, Mr. Godin. We'll come back to that.
Mrs. O'Neill-Gordon, it's your turn.
9:25 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for being here this morning and thank you for the presentation you've made.
This report certainly has a lot of statistics for us and gives us much information to consider and understand the many areas of settlement of immigrants.
My question is this. The author of the statistical portrait opted to choose FOLS as the identification criterion. Why was this criterion chosen, and what are the pros and cons of this choice?
9:30 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
Thank you for your questions.
In the past, we used to use the mother tongue criterion. One of the reasons was that prior to 1971 the mother tongue question was the only question asked, along with the knowledge of official languages question, in the census. Following the recommendation of the Laurendeau-Dunton commission in the 1960s, Statistics Canada added a question in the census on the language spoken most often at home.
We used to use the mother tongue criterion because it was easy to make historical comparisons, at least from the 1950s onward. However, since the middle of the 1980s, because of the levels of immigration, which kept increasing, more and more immigrants tended to adopt English or French as their main language. It was considered by many that to use only the mother tongue variable—that is, English, French, or “other”, or “allophones”, which was used in the 1970s in Quebec—was somewhat restrictive. They wanted to take into account those who didn't have French as their mother tongue but who could use French on a daily basis at work or in everyday life. That's why the Treasury Board asked Statistics Canada to develop a variable called “first official language spoken” at the end of the 1980s—in 1989, to be exact. We derived two methods. One was adopted by the Treasury Board.
Overall, in some places it makes a very important difference. If you look, let's say, at Canada outside Quebec in general, there isn't much difference between using the mother tongue variable or the first official language spoken variable, because we have 4.1% who have French as their mother tongue and 4.2% who have French as first official language spoken. In Quebec, it makes a significant difference, because 8% of the population have English as their mother tongue, compared with 13% of the population who have English as first official language spoken. What this takes into account is the attraction that English can have on immigrants in Quebec, or used to have in the past.
When we look at some cities specifically—if we look at Toronto, for example—if we take into account the “first official language spoken” variable, more than 40% of the francophone population has French as the first official language spoken. If you take the mother tongue variable, the rate would be much lower, around 10% or even less than that. Just to give you another example, in Ottawa it's around 15%.
So using the “first official language spoken” variable is much more inclusive, if you like. It takes into account the adoption by the recent waves of immigrants who have come to Canada of one or the other official language.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
According to the statistical profile, the francophone immigrant population comprises two groups, those who have only French as FOLS and those who have both French and English. Why is this distinction made, and should the committee always take this distinction into account in its study of immigration?
9:30 a.m.
Chief Specialist, Language Statistics Section, Statistics Canada
Your question is very relevant. The thing is that usually what the Treasury Board does is, and the approach that was adopted in the early 1990s was, because we couldn't really attribute French or English to a fair number of immigrants outside Quebec, to split them into two groups. That is, they took half and put them along with the francophone population and took the other half and put them along with the anglophone population. Obviously, depending on the approach you take, if you include all of these people together, you have a population close to 130,000 people; if you split them up, you have a population of 100,000 people.
The thing is, if you want to develop strategies to integrate immigrants into the francophone population outside of Quebec, we realized that this was important, because these immigrants—those who only have French, and those who have English and French—do not come from the same countries, do not have the same linguistic behaviours and characteristics as those who only have French. Because the intention of the federal government is to increase francophone immigration outside Quebec, in hoping that they will contribute to the vitality of official language minorities, it is important to make this distinction because of their behaviours and characteristics that are different.